Blinded heart

Religious communities are committed to inclusion, compassion and recognising the full humanity of all. But for people with disabilities, a religious community can be a surprisingly alienating place. Judaism has the primacy of physical perfection written into its sacred text. Islam has a cultural aversion to dogs—guide dogs for the blind included. As for Christianity: Jesus performed miraculous cures—but wouldn't it have been more useful if he'd cured society of its prejudices against the disabled?

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Transcript

BLINDED HEART

This program was first broadcast on 23 June 2012

David Rutledge: Today, we’re shedding light on an area of discrimination that you may not have thought much about. People with physical, sensory and intellectual disabilities say that they’re often excluded from their religious communities. This can manifest as a lack of physical access to places of worship or to sensory aids like braille sacred texts, or it can simply be a matter of not feeling welcomed and fully accepted by a religious community.

Many of us know about communities like the L’Arche community where people with and without intellectual disabilities live together and support each other. Well, today’s program isn’t about that kind of intentional community; it’s about the communities we all participate in: in the city, in the suburbs and the country towns. Today we’re hearing Christians, Jews and Muslims reveal their experiences of inclusion and exclusion and we’re asking why people belonging to faiths that are based on love, compassion and community are so often blind to people with disabilities. The program’s produced by Kerry Stewart.

(Music)

Melanie Sarif: Michael joined a… I took him to a Jewish day school. Mikey was three or four. And one night I was at a meeting and there was a couple in front of me, a Jewish couple, and they said, ‘Who’s this little boy that comes to your school? He’s got some problem.’ And I just stood there and my heart… I just went stone. They said, ‘I think his name is Mikey? We don’t like him mixing with my child. I don’t like him mixing with my child and I’d rather get rid of him. Is there any possibility, Ruth, that we could do that? Maybe get Michael out of the school?’ Well, I tell you, that was the last that you heard from those people. Ruth, the owner of the school, was up in arms, and did she support us! She could not believe what she was actually hearing.

Maysa Abouzeid: It has happened where a lot of blind Muslims have gotten guide dogs and then decided not to have one due to the whole stigma in the community about dogs being dirty, dogs smell. And my dad sort of had to, like, become very brave and say, ‘My daughter needs this dog,’ and I shouldn’t really worry what the community thinks.

Michael Conlon: Rebecca, she would talk in mass, she would answer the priest. And she knew the priest, because when she was sick in hospital the priest used to come to visit her—Father McNamara his name was, beautiful man. And, yes, you’d get the looks, but we just told them to get over it. ‘Too bad—you don’t like it; sit somewhere else. Go to another service,’ you know? And in our parish in Windsor there are other disabled children. There was one family, I think she had four children, five children, all in wheelchairs. They used to come in a big bus and they’d all fill out the front and then Rebecca would be there and that.

You know, and you get a few stares and things like that, but generally we never worried. If they said anything, we’d tell them to get over it and not worry. I mean, if you did then we wouldn’t come, and I don’t think that would be right.

Kerry Stewart: These are just some of the experiences that people have had when challenging their religious communities around inclusion. We’ll hear more from Melanie Sarif and her son Mikey, Maysa Abouzeid and Michael Conlon a bit later.

Andy Calder is a Uniting Church minister based in the Synod of Victoria, where he has responsibility for disability inclusion.

Andy Calder: I lived for some time in the UK, in a community called L’Arche, which is a shared residential environment with a number of people with an intellectual disability. That then led me into working back here in Australia with people with disabilities. And then in the mid-eighties, I came to grief myself with a road incident in which I was crushed by a truck and spent three years in the rehabilitation. So you could say I’ve been walking the talk over many, many years now.

When we consider that one in five people have disability and you look at faith communities, and I’m particularly talking about Christian faith communities and the ones that I represent, that same representation of percentage just isn’t there. So we have to ask the question, why might that be? It’s a problematic term, this one, ‘inclusion’, and I struggle with it in terms of my own job title. But for me it’s not about a group of people who have all of the power and all of the wherewithal to include a so-called weaker group of people or individuals; rather, there is a strong onus, I think, on people like myself and all church people to look very closely and examine the structures, the attitudes, the prejudices, the theology that in fact is excluding of people’s participation.

And, you know, everybody’s enriched by the diversity. And I think congregations as they exist today are denied the gifts, the skills, the presence of people who historically have either been shunned or have experienced exclusionary practices. So I want to actually take this opportunity to, as a Uniting Church minister, to say a heartfelt apology to all people who have been at the raw end of such experiences within the Uniting Church. And we certainly want to redress that as far as we possibly can into the future.

Michael Conlon: Well, if somebody goes to a church and experiences any sort of rejection, then I wouldn’t go to that church, because the people of God shouldn’t be like that. And, again, like I said, you will get some people in every church that are probably like that, but if it happened on a whole, and especially if they said, ‘Oh, your child’s noisy,’ or ‘Your disability is causing a problem here,’ I don’t believe in church-hopping at all, but if a church is like that you just go to another. There’s plenty of churches around, plenty, so there is somewhere for somebody.

My name’s Michael Conlon. I’m from Sydney. When I was 20 I had a motorbike accident and had a spinal injury. In regards to religion I was born into a Catholic family, went to Catholic schools, went to church when I was about 13, stopped going to church when I was about 22, had a motorbike accident when I was 20.

Kerry Stewart: How did you cope with the accident? Did you question God?

Michael Conlon: When you have any sort of disability or any major accident, you go through a lot of stages, and I did go through the stages of anger, denial, depression. And at the stage of depression, I went through a bit of a bad time. I was really struggling with being disabled and what to do with the rest of my life. And some friends of mine had become Christians and they used to drop in and visit me and told me about Jesus and said, you know, ‘It would be good if… you know, go to church, read the Bible.’ And at first I didn’t want to but I knew that the situation I was in, being disabled and being in a bit of depression and that, I thought, ‘Well, I know that God is real, I’ve got no problem with that. And I know there is a heaven and life’s got to be better than this.’ So I thought I’d give it a go.

So for about two years I started praying and reading the Bible, and I looked at a whole lot of different churches but always came back to my own Catholic faith. And then about 1984, I came to a group called the Servants of Jesus Community, which is the group I’m still in now. I’ve been here for 28 years and it was there I really encountered God in a real way. And I’ve grown from there.

Kerry Stewart: The Servants of Jesus Community in Western Sydney has both Catholic and Protestant services.

Melinda Jones is a human rights lawyer and an Orthodox Jew living in Melbourne. She has five grown up children, two of whom have disabilities.

Melinda Jones: People with disabilities are excluded in some ways—some consciously and a lot simply by the way in which society constructs disability. So there are instances of people with disabilities being excluded from Jewish schools; however, there’s been a big change in the last few years and hopefully that will no longer be the case. There are issues in synagogues where, for example, the women are upstairs and the only way to the accessible lift, when there is fortunately one there at all, is through the men’s section, which would therefore be inappropriate.

So the physical access is a problem in a lot of observance situations. The Jewish community’s made up of lots of small communities and some of them are very accessible and some of them are not so accessible. People find it very difficult to get inside the shoes of somebody whose experience is so incredibly different to their own. And exclusion is… a lot of that is an attitude and it’s an attitude that is simply, ‘I’m getting on with my own life. I don’t need to worry about anything else.’ You know, it’s sort of very often a complete blindness to other people’s experiences.

Melanie Sarif: My name is Mel. My husband, Richard, is here and Michael, who’s my child—we call him Mikey. And we’re just sitting comfortably in my home and just chatting about our faith. We come from the Jewish faith and Michael had his Bar Mitzvah. And I must say we had an absolutely fantastic day. The people around us, and the support and the encouragement from the synagogue that we go to, was absolutely fantastic.

Michael was born with moderate intellectual disability and when he was, well, obviously really young, we didn’t think about giving him a Bar Mitzvah. Of course as Michael grew older, we thought to ourselves, ‘Well, he needs to have a Bar Mitzvah,’ because as a boy in the Jewish faith, when you turn 13 you become of age, you become a man, and we really wanted Michael to celebrate. We just didn’t know how to go about it.

Anyway, we came across a man by the name of Costa. At that time Michael was needing a lot of respite, and this guy came to us from an organisation called Jewish Care. Costa came to us and we said, ‘Can you help us? We want to give Michael a Bar Mitzvah, but we don’t know how to go about it.’ And Costa said, ‘Don’t worry! We’ll organise it.’ And Costa used to come every Monday to Mikey in the afternoon and sit with him and teach Michael the blessings. So it would be the Jewish blessings over the wine, over the bread; and he laminated everything—he’d typed it up in big letters—and week-by-week Mikey learnt the blessings.

Kerry Stewart: Mikey, how was that for you?

Michael Sarif: Um, yeah, it was fun but when the big day came up I was scared.

Kerry Stewart: Yeah, I can imagine. How did you go?

Michael Sarif: Very well.

Kerry Stewart: So tell me what you had to do.

Michael Sarif: I had to practise all of the Hebrew and everything.

(Music)

Issa Musse: I’m Sheik Issa Musse. I’m Imam by profession; that is, religious leader for the Muslim community. I’m based in the Virgin Mary Mosque in Hopper’s Crossing, Melbourne, Victoria and I came from Somalia 18 years ago. I lost my sight in childhood. I lived in the countryside, but fortunately I was able to move to the city and be placed in an orphanage.

Kerry Stewart: Why were you rejected initially? Was that because you were visually impaired?

Issa Musse: Yes, that was the situation, because back home people think that a disability is a barrier, it is a handicap, a person cannot do much. But fortunately in the orphanage people did not have that understanding. They did understand me very well and initially it was a problem, but as time went on people realised that I did have some potential. In fact, I remember I was in the primary school and I did not have braille skill and everything that the teacher would say, I would have to memorise. And my friends would come and ask me to repeat what the lesson was about and the questions the teacher asked and I would store that in a very short time and give them back. So they liked that kind of help.

Kerry Stewart: And your skill extends to memorising the Qur’an, is that correct?

Issa Musse: It is. It is. I have a very good… I think this is a gift I got from God that I am able to memorise easily.

Kerry Stewart: So how have people with a disability—traditionally—how have they been treated? Have they been excluded from the mosque, or taking up leadership roles, or being a part of the Muslim community?

Issa Musse: You know, religion is something and culture is another. In Islam, a person is not considered disabled as long as they look after themselves, they have potential. But culturally, culturally people may think that a person with disability cannot do much and therefore is likely to be excluded. But everything we do in Islam we refer either to Qur’an or to the teaching of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. And when we go back to the time of Prophet Muhammad, we see that he promoted people with disability. In fact, whenever he wasn’t present in his city, Medina—he would be out for some mission, for some work—he would leave in charge of the whole city a blind man.

So that meant that a person with disability can be leader as long as he fulfils the job expected of him to do. In fact, great, great scholars of Islam, some of them were blind, some of them could not walk very well, and people respected them because they are in the forefront of religious institutions.

Maysa Abouzeid: I remember as a kid asking my mum, going, ‘What religion are we?’ And she would be like, ‘You’re Muslim. Go ask your father.’ So I’d go and ask my dad, ‘What religion are we?’ ‘You’re Muslim.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, OK.’ And then as I got older I decided to really look into it, because a lot of my family members are actually very devout Muslims. My cousins here in Melbourne and also my sibling, they all went to an Islamic education and I attended public school, due to my disability.

So I wasn’t given, I guess, the education to really gain more in my faith. So I had to do it more on my own than having a system or an education to be able to do it. And I guess I felt like I sort of missed out on all that Arabic scripture and all that. So that made me feel a little bit more isolated. And my disability, it made me feel like I was an alien a little bit.

Kerry Stewart: When we look at Christian, Jewish and Muslim sacred texts we find that they all refer to disability. The stories of healing by Jesus are very powerful for Christians, so how does Reverend Andy Calder interpret them?

Andy Calder: I’m not one to dismiss the possibility of a miraculous cure or healing, but for me it’s more about a healing of our environment and of our society.

Kerry Stewart: Is Jesus to blame here, too? I mean he certainly did a lot of miraculous cures, so would disabled people be better off if he’d just said, ‘Your life is perfect the way it is’?

Andy Calder: Yes, many people with disabilities have, or I have had conversations along those lines. And whilst the healing stories of Jesus are there for us to interpret for our day, we need to be very careful that they aren’t interpreted in a way that perpetuates the sense that healing is about the physical cure, that, rather, it is about people being restored to a full humanity, a full life in relation to other people: their friends, their family, those who they love, the wider community.

Michael Conlon: Like, I believe in healing, ‘cos the Bible talks about how Jesus actually healed. And I guess that was one of the things that first made me come along, too; like, you’d read the Bible and you’d read these miracles about the lame man walking, you know, jumping up and leaping and praising God. And you’re thinking, ‘Hey, that would be pretty cool. I don’t really like being in this wheelchair.’ So I guess that was a catalyst into coming… one of the catalysts into coming to faith as well as being in a bit of depression and, again, knowing that Jesus, maybe he can heal that.

But over the years I’ve never really blamed God. I guess I knew I did something stupid. Like, basically I got on a motorbike and I’d only been riding for a couple of months. It was just something stupid that I did at a time, which caused my disability. So it wasn’t God’s fault, it wasn’t necessarily divine intervention or wasn’t because I sinned or anything like that, even though my life was not the most holy life, if you like. You know, I worked in pubs, I was a barman, and I got into a bit of drugs and drink and different things like that, so… But I never thought it was my sin, I just knew it was my own fault.

But there are times when you know, like, I have questioned God: ‘Why now, why don’t you get out? I’ve been in here nearly 30 years and I know you have the power to do it.’ But I guess I know that He has a plan and I guess I know that whether I’m in a wheelchair or not in a wheelchair, I’ll be still fulfilling God’s plan. And I know I do fulfil God’s plan.

Kerry Stewart: And this brings up the question of what it is to be normal. I mean the Old Testament and modern society emphasises a sort of perfection of the body, which doesn’t help, does it?

Andy Calder: No, and I think that’s some of the theology that we need to look at around what is perfection in terms of some of the priestly inheritance within the Christian tradition that we’re mindful of, that in the Hebrew scriptures there are references to priests who had a range of different blemishes who were not allowed to be in the sanctuary. That’s part of the legacy that we live with: that this sense of normalcy, deviancy, that spectrum, has become very polarised, and so we still have this sense that the perfect body is what determines a whole person. And the healing stories of course have often been used in the past to emphasise or to be talking points around who is whole and who is not, who is in, who is out.

So I think that’s come through in the church today, where we often have assumptions that people with disabilities can’t be active participants in leadership roles, in leading Sunday School, in preaching. We’ve got a challenge there also in terms of our thinking that we need to turn upside-down.

Kerry Stewart: And isn’t the pursuit of cure and able-bodiedness a sort of a contradiction in terms for Christians, when taking into account a broken Christ?

Andy Calder: Yes, it’s an astonishing thing, really, that central to Christian theology and the primal image that we work with is with a broken God—Christ on the cross—and yet we still have a sense in which we want to have everything very neatly, nicely tidied up in terms of having a theology around what is good and whole and perfect.

And so whilst Jesus died and the image of his hands and his side being shown to his followers afterwards, in terms of cure and healing, he wasn’t cured. And yet the Christian understanding is that his return to full life was around a restoration of relationship with God and with those who were his followers and those who he loved. So I think part of what we need to promote and to talk of more is the image of a disabled God.

Melinda Jones: There is a debate within the Jewish community, amongst scholars of Judaism and disability, about the role or the significance in any way of perfection. And this is one of the big divides between the Orthodox and the Reform community. The Reform community have interpreted the Torah, the Jewish Bible, as being a cult of perfection and being a priestly cult where all the priests have got to be perfect. Because the reform Jews don’t consider the oral law to be as important as the written law, they therefore think that we should dismiss what is in the Torah and we should replace it by something else.

The Orthodox perspective is different. Judaism is not to do with perfection in any way whatsoever and if you look at the priestly cult again, which is where we’re told that there’s meant to be perfection, one of the rules, for example, is that a person who’s got a disfigured hand is not meant to participate in the priestly blessing, and that’s what is implied in the Torah, in the written Torah. When you go to the oral law, you actually find that actually… that if the community are happy about it—which they generally seem to be—then it’s fine for the person to do that.

So what they found is that there are people who are of the priestly class, the Kohanim, who when they do the blessing go up onto the bima and bless the congregation, and it’s been considered perfectly acceptable for that person not to be perfect. There were biblical leaders who were blind, like Isaac; there were biblical leaders with speech impediments, like Moses. So if we look to the Bible, we should see that everyone is made imperfectly and it shouldn’t cause a barrier between your imperfections, whatever they are, which are like everybody else’s imperfections, to full participation in society.

Kerry Stewart: So how are people with physical or sensory or intellectual disabilities referred to in Islamic sacred texts?

Issa Musse: Religiously in Islamic understanding, disability is not a curse, nor is it blessing. It is, rather, a natural condition whenever it happens to a person. It’s just like the way people get sick, people get health, people pass through poverty and so on. In Islam, the physical disability is just a normal condition.

In fact, the Qur’an doesn’t talk about physical disability per se. Whenever the Qur’an raises the question of disability, it puts it in the context of a spiritual drawback: a person that has not lived their life properly, they have not been productive in their life, that’s the person that Islam tells is disabled. There’s a very good passage in chapter twenty-second of the Qur’an: it says it is not the eye that goes blind, it is rather the heart that is blinded.

(Music)

Kerry Stewart: So what are some of the barriers for people with disabilities? Orthodox Jew and human rights lawyer Melinda Jones:

Melinda Jones: We’re enjoined not to put stumbling blocks in the way of the blind. Deuteronomy 27:18 is where you’ll find the principle that you should not put a stumbling block in the path of the blind. What that is, is that we should not make things more difficult; we shouldn’t create barriers to inclusion. And barriers to inclusion, as we’ve talked about before, take very many forms.

One of the things that I’ve often said is that disability is socially constructed. And one of the things that I mean by that is, I have got pretty bad eyesight and if I was in a place where I didn’t have access to glasses, I would have a serious disability. The fact that I’ve got access to glasses prevents the stumbling block being put in my way. So often people wouldn’t have a disability, or the disability would have a very different meaning in their lives, if they had access to the right equipment. So not putting a stumbling block is not just not putting tripwires and saying to someone who’s blind, ‘You can walk safely through there,’ it means actively looking for ways of moving barriers out of the way.

Andy Calder: When we come to talk about structural changes to buildings, that is a little more difficult sometimes, because for many church communities the funding is an issue. Within the Uniting Church we developed a disability action plan that we submitted to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and the church committed itself to creating a disability access fund so that congregations can apply and receive some matching funds for the modifications that they need to do to make their buildings more accessible for the needs of people with disabilities.

It’s important to say, too, that when these changes are made, they’re not only in the interests of people with disabilities. People increasingly within congregations, often who do have issues of disability associated with aging—that’s going to be a terrific plus for them, young families who might need to access with prams. So these building modifications have a universal application.

Michael Conlon: This is a song I wrote and after 28 years of being a Christian, after 30 years of being a disabled, the thing that matters most is that God loves me and He’s calling me to him. And this is from the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, and it’s about intimacy, about how God is calling us to intimacy with Him.

(Michael singing)

Kerry Stewart: We’re sitting in the meeting hall here. There are heaps of chairs, no solid pews. So they’re very moveable, aren’t they? And we’re sitting at the front of the meeting hall and you’re in your wheelchair beside me. So that’s inclusion, too, isn’t it?

Michael Conlon: Well, that’s right, that’s right. Here in our community, the community I’m in—the Servants of Jesus—we only owned this building for, I think, five or six years, maybe seven; that was one of the things we did think of, that there are people in a wheelchair, so there was never any thought of having fixed pews. And we have a stair climber. They used to actually carry me up the stairs, but one of the members in community saw us doing that one day and he said, ‘Oh, that’s not good,’ so he actually gave us however much it is for the stair climber. He supplied that.

If you notice, our stage area and our PA area at the back has ramps. And that’s because I’m a musician and I also run the PA, so when they put that together, they thought of me. So people have got us in mind, you know? Like, there are people here with disabilities in mind.

(Michael singing)

Andy Calder: So I think it’s first and foremost a community has to ask itself, ‘Are we really open? Are we wanting to embrace the person who has come and said they want to be a part of who we are?’ And I think that opening of the heart is absolutely the first thing that has to be explored and undertaken to be committed to.

I can think of an instance where a family—this is an example of a sensory disability, a young girl of three years of age shortly after birth contracted meningitis and became profoundly deaf—the family really wanted to maintain the connection for her within that faith community. And so they, in consultation with the church leaders and the church community, created some cards so that as people came into church and received the information in their hymn books and song books, they’d also receive a card with the symbol of hello in Auslan.

And then as people began to become more familiar with those signs, additional words were added, if you like, to the vocabulary of the congregation. And so in that way there was a welcome through the initiative and the endeavour of those people to learn a new language, if you like. And for that family, that sent a very powerful message of yes, we are embraced and loved within this community.

Kerry Stewart: Reverend Andy Calder.

Orthodox Jews observe prohibitions concerning work on Shabbat which can include using electricity. So how are people in electric wheelchairs affected? Melinda Jones:

Melinda Jones: The problem of needing electricity to get somewhere—so using an electric wheelchair—is one of those things where there is the possibility of that being an exception to a rule. And the question is which rabbi you ask the question. In Judaism there’s not really a hierarchy of rabbis. It’s not like you have a pope, who gives the ultimate decision. Any rabbi can give an answer, and there are some rabbis who are considered more authoritative than others, but if you ask the rabbi of your community and that rabbi says it’s OK, then it’s OK. And that’s why you can find one synagogue where a practice is completely OK and another synagogue where this practice is really frowned upon.

I was present one day when a young woman was going to synagogue in an electric wheelchair and a so-called Orthodox man crossed the road so he didn’t have to confront the person in the wheelchair. And therefore… if he’d come across her he would have had to greet her; he didn’t want to greet her, because he didn’t approve of the wheelchair. So he crossed the road. And this was a man who was a headmaster at a school, and it was really outrageous that anyone should behave like that.

(Music)

Kerry Stewart: A huge stumbling block for Muslims with visual impairment is having a guide dog. This issue came to public attention when some Muslim taxi drivers in our major cities were fined for refusing to take guide dogs in their cabs. So what lies at the foundation of this difficulty with dogs? Sheikh Issa Musse:

Issa Musse: This is lack of understanding. People are confused, because on one hand the teaching they have is that dogs are unclean and therefore one has to avoid any contact with dogs. And that’s the orthodox teaching of Islam, because Islam has been codified through four main schools of thought, so three of these four take that view: that dogs are to be avoided and no one has to deal with them.

But there is another school: the fourth school allows dogs to be usable and they make it’s uncleanness, they make it very restricted. But the cab drivers here come predominantly from countries where a dog is a very big issue, a dog is not considered clean. So that’s why you have this problem. But we have been addressing that issue and I think it’s not like where it was ten years ago, but people are getting more understanding now, better than before.

Maysa Abouzeid: I don’t know whether I’m the best spokesperson, but you always hear every now and again in the guide dog newsletter that the Islamic community are doing something about it. But the effects of it is that it’s me, or Muslims like me, that have a guide dog that have to take taxis, and then they have the excuse, ‘Oh, I’m Muslim. I can’t have the dog in the taxi.’ And then I go, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ And then I usually say, ‘Would you rather pick up a drunk person or a dog? Someone that’s going to puke all over your cab or…’ And then they usually agree and then they let me into the cab.

Issa Musse: Well, we told them, we told them in our mosques, we told that dogs, specially the guide dogs, are not like the stray dogs. And so they are cared for, they are healthy, they are not dirty, and anything that can offer a benefit whatsoever in Islam is acceptable; it is taken. So hunting dog is an exception that people can use; guard dog is one; guide dog—although it wasn’t a guide dog there in that time of Prophet Muhammad. So those are the few exceptions.

And it goes also into the human rights of the blind who are using the guide dogs, because they need… this is their special need to have guide dog. So the cab driver has to accommodate that.

Maysa Abouzeid: I went through a massive phase for the first year when I got Clementine, a year before I got Clem, and it was… I think it was my family adjusting, my immediate family adjusting to the fact of having a dog. And also the community, that my dad sort of had to, like, become very brave and say, ‘My daughter needs this dog,’ and I shouldn’t really worry what the community thinks. And I’m very thankful for that: that my dad was very brave to put his idea of pleasing the community… to not even worry about that.

Kerry Stewart: Have all of your family accepted Clementine?

Maysa Abouzeid: Not all, but my immediate family, which are the most important. But my aunts and uncles, I just… they have their own fears and misconceptions. And I don’t let it bother me, because I can’t. It’s my independence and I’ve had this dog for four years, so it’s not going to go anywhere. (Laughs)

Kerry Stewart: But you don’t take her around to their house?

Maysa Abouzeid: If I go see a relative of mine I would just leave her at home, and that’s fine. I compromise. I happily compromise. ‘Cos and then I know the next day I’ll go home and then I will grab my dog and go off to school.

Maysa Abouzeid: She’s under the table, like a little cave. She’s a cave dog. She likes to hide under tables and under really cramped spaces. She doesn’t like to be in the middle of the room.

Kerry Stewart: What has she given you?

Maysa Abouzeid: She’s got a… Clementine has got a massive sense of humour. She’s a very funny dog and she’s a quite a talkative dog as well at times and she’s just a lot of good company. And I remember travelling to the US a few years ago and she was great company there.

Kerry Stewart: And so does Clementine break down barriers? I mean do you feel less isolated? Do people come up to you because you’ve got a dog?

Maysa Abouzeid: Yeah, yeah, people that are dog people really like having, seeing guide dogs and they really admire it. And I get a different reaction from, like, a group of Islamic girls if I’m walking through the city and then sometimes I go, ‘Hey, don’t worry, don’t worry,’ or I say something like, ‘Really that’s not necessary to be frightened.’ And, like, I used to be really scared of dogs as well before I got Clementine. I had to get over it really quickly. So I completely understand how the community’s got this massive fear of dogs, because I used to be like that too.

So I have to remind myself I was just as scared, because I wasn’t exposed to dogs as a Muslim. And then you get told as a kid that they’re dirty and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of misconceptions. And then I… because I wanted my independence I had to, like, suck it up and really challenge that. And I’m glad I did.

(Music)

Kerry Stewart: Rituals, prayer and the sacraments are all important parts of engaging in a religion. So how are people included or excluded from these? Michael Conlon:

Michael Conlon: My wife and I married in 1988. My wife was actually a nurse for handicapped children for a number of years. Because of my disability we couldn’t have children. We looked into adoption and then ended up fostering. But because of Christine’s background of looking after disabled children, when she first applied to be a foster parent there was a particular little girl that needed respite care for three weeks, so they asked Christine if they could take her. And she was in a home of a lady that was 65 years old, that looked after children who had been sexually abused, that was her forte. She knew herself that because of her age it was a bit hard to look after Rebecca and she saw that we were happy with her, so she said, ‘Look, why don’t you just leave her with the Conlons?’

And then not long after we had Rebecca, we had a phone call again from DoCS to say, ‘Look, there’s this little boy who has special needs, can you just look after him,’ again, ‘for a couple of weeks?’ And he had autism and he stayed with us. And then the same thing happened with another little boy. He was born in Thailand—we don’t really know his background, but he had a disability. He needed, again, he just needed that respite care, and when he came to us he stayed. We ended up adopting three.

So, Rebecca, who came to us first, she was actually born normal and through child abuse became disabled. And then, like I said, the other boy, James, born in Thailand. But both of them had conditions where they couldn’t digest food: Rebecca through the abuse; James just through birth. And so when they were… both of them when they were about 15, they started not getting any nourishment, even though we fed them, and they passed away. And the autistic boy, he’s now 22. He left home. He’s doing his own thing. He’s got his own little flat. And he’s doing well.

Kerry Stewart: And so did each of those children, did they go through the Sacraments in the Catholic Church and what was their relationship to their faith?

Michael Conlon: Yes, yes, they all received First Communion. James was probably the one who didn’t fully understand it, but Rebecca had a very good… even though she couldn’t talk very well and she had a lot of disability, she had a very acute understanding. So she knew who Jesus was; she would call Jesus ‘JeJe’. And she used to say, ‘I love JeJe.’ And we’d hear her talking in the room and we’d go and say, ‘Rebecca, who are you talking to?’ She’d say, ‘JeJe.’ ‘Oh,’ we’d say, ‘you see JeJe?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you see angels?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you see demons?’ ‘Oo, yucky,’ you know?

So she knew and had a relationship with God and Patrick also had—he was the autistic boy—he had a very strong relationship with the Lord and still has today. And when Rebecca was about 12—11 or 12—we did look into get her to receive the Sacraments. At first, one bishop didn’t really want to, and then we talked to a priest friend of ours, Father John, and he knew the bishop. He went and saw the bishop, he said, ‘Look, I believe these children really know the Lord. They have faith and they should be able to receive the Sacraments.’ And so the bishop allowed us to have First Holy Communion. So we actually had First Holy Communion at our house. This priest came and gave them First Holy Communion.

And so, yeah, they love coming to mass. They love the Lord, they love coming to the meetings, they loved the music. Our community’s very charismatic so there’s a lot of music. We have a band, guitars, keyboards; and I play and sing myself sometimes on the stage. And they loved it, they loved the music, yeah. So yes, they had a very deep relationship with God.

Maysa Abouzeid: When I was in my undergraduate, in my second year of university, I started using the Muslim prayer room at my uni here in Melbourne. And I brought my guide dog and I had someone from Guide Dogs Victoria come out and speak to the prayer room girls. But because it’s also international students as well—it’s not just local students—and they really didn’t like the fact of having a dog inside the prayer room, because it’s their space. And I respected that as much as possible, so right across from the prayer room there was an office and they absolutely loved Clementine in there. So I’d leave Clementine in the office where she was adored, and then I’d run off to the prayer room.

And I felt like I was… I was struggling to understand my disability and, like, my faith was still there and I still felt like I could express myself with my faith and, you know, have that connection, but I just felt like the community was just so stubborn. So then I gradually stopped going. And then I’d probably go if a friend would text me and go, ‘I’ll meet you in the prayer room,’ and then I’d leave Clem in the office and then go into the prayer room. So I stopped attending as much as I was before, because I just felt like I wanted to… I just didn’t feel like I was really… really welcomed.

Kerry Stewart: Was that important for you to have your Bar Mitzvah?

Michael Sarif: Yes, it was.

Kerry Stewart: Why was it important?

Michael Sarif: Because I thought since all of the Jewish people were having their Bar Mitzvahs and everything, I thought, ‘Why don’t I have a go at having one?’

Kerry Stewart: Is your faith, is your Jewish faith, important to you? And how is it important? What do you like to do in your Jewish faith?

Michael Sarif: Well, when you have had your Bar Mitzvah, you have this thing called tefillin and, yeah, I don’t know how to explain it.

Melanie Sarif: I can explain it and then I’ll go back to you. With tefillin you… it’s a blessing and it comes in like a… it’s a roll and you roll it around your hand and then there’s a prayer that sits on your head. And, yeah, and then the rabbi will come up to you and you will follow the rabbi as he says the blessing; you will copy him. And it’s a beautiful blessing. And when you do have a Bar Mitzvah you can do tefillin. I’m not sure if you can do it as much as you like; I know you can do it on… there’s certain days. But Mikey really enjoys putting on tefillin, as we say. And to Michael his Jewish faith is very, very important. It means really a lot to him.

Kerry Stewart: Do you have any sort of responsibilities in the home that are religious responsibilities, like I don’t know, lighting the candles or anything like that?

Michael Sarif: Drinking the wine and saying the prayers.

Melanie Sarif: Yeah, we could say a prayer if you want us to.

Kerry Stewart: Yeah, that’d be lovely.

Melanie Sarif: Yeah, OK. (Melanie and Michael say a prayer)

And on a Friday night I will say my prayers over the candles, which are just up there—yeah, the candles. And then we will… traditionally every Friday night we have a Shabbat meal within this…

(To Michael) What food, darling? What about that?

Kerry Stewart: You want to tell me about the kosher food?

Michael Sarif: No, about the special food that we have.

Melanie Sarif: Oh, oh, like on a Friday night we’ll have our special food. It’s some soup and knaidlach and then we’ll have chopped liver and chopped herring and gefilte fish. And me and Mikey enjoy all of those, you know, yummy treats.

Kerry Stewart: Everyone likes a feast.

Melanie Sarif: Yes, you’re right. (Laughter) Everyone does.

(Music)

Kerry Stewart: But people fear difference, don’t they? It’s very difficult to get over the difference factor. How can one do that?

Andy Calder: I wish I had a magic wand to answer that question. I think it’s that contact with people does help to diminish that, when we can reduce or eliminate anxieties and fears that we have about people who we may not have encountered before. It may also be being kind to our own differences, being mindful that we have things about ourselves that are quirky or we don’t like. There might be things that we don’t like about the way we look, or the way we function or operate physically. So to have a sense that that’s a shared universal thing, that if we can be kind to ourselves, in a sense there’s then a greater acceptance of the diversity of others.

Michael Conlon: If a church doesn’t have anyone with a disability, they’re missing on a chance of learning how to be compassionate. Our overall community elder here, who started the community—he won’t mind me saying this—he did have difficulty with Rebecca’s disability. Rebecca couldn’t walk, but she’d roll around the floor. So she’d roll around the floor and we would be at a meeting, at a house meeting with the actual, one of the pastors in the community, and she’d roll over and grab his shoelaces and undo them and start chewing on them. And he’d be going (gestures) like this, and his wife would say, ‘No, it’s OK, dear. It’s OK.’ But he grew to love her very much.

And you don’t know you can do something until you’re thrown into the deep end, basically. And you don’t know you can love someone with a disability unless that person with a disability is there. And if you can’t, then you need God’s grace. I mean we need God’s grace to love. And sometimes it’s easier to love a person with a disability than an obnoxious person or a rude person who hasn’t got a disability, or who’s maybe of a different ethnic background, or different culture or different country or whatever. It’s not only disability that you can have trouble with, but you have to learn to get out of yourself and you have to learn to love and sometimes you just need plain old grace to do it.

And so having someone with a disability in your church gives you that opportunity to grow in that compassion, to grow in that love. And we are all members of Christ’s body; if we’re all members of his body, therefore Christ’s body has to have people that are disabled to fill his body.

Maysa Abouzeid: In my first year of university, I took a history class and I met this woman and she’s deaf-blind. And she inspired me a lot and we also graduated together as well. So when I first met her I would yell into her ear, her ear that she could have some hearing in, so I’d yell in it. And I guess I absolutely hated it. The following semester I decided to enrol in an Auslan sign language course and I did that for like three, four years. And since then I communicate with her sufficiently fluent—not great, but sufficiently.

Kerry Stewart: And so you do tactile signing, don’t you?

Maysa Abouzeid: Oh yeah. I do tactile signing and tactile signing is basically hand-on-hand communication with people that are deaf-blind. So the deaf-blind person puts his or her hands over the top of yours and then they feel your hand gestures—the shape of your hand and the movement of your hand and where it’s located. And then you can structure a sentence.

Kerry Stewart: Is it important to you to feel like you can help others?

Maysa Abouzeid: It does. It does. I guess that’s when I feel most happiest is when God’s with me, is when I’m helping other people and helping people to really feel as happy as I do.

Melinda Jones: One of the things that is said is that every Jew is a letter of the Torah. Those who want the community to be strong need every single letter of the Torah to be there. It’s said that only when every single letter is there that we can actually move on to any other stage, whether it’s the coming of the Messiah, whether it’s a better society. We can’t afford as a community to let some of our letters be rubbed out. And it’s irrelevant whether the person has a disability or not; or, in fact, I could say not irrelevant, it’s crucial that as a community that we reach out to bring those people in so that the Torah can be complete.

(Music)

Kerry Stewart: That brings us to the end of this Encounter I’ve called ‘Blinded Heart’. My thanks to Melinda Jones, Maysa Abouzeid, Melanie and Michael Sarif, The Reverend Andy Calder, Sheik Issa Musse and Michael Conlon. Technical production today was by Phillip Ullman and Judy Rapley. I’m Kerry Stewart and it was good to have your company.

Guests

Maysa Abouzeid

Blind Muslim with guide dog ClementineMelbourne

Rev Andy Calder

Uniting Church MinisterDisability InclusionSynod of VictoriaMelbourne

Sheikh Issa Mussa

ImamVirgin Mary MosqueMelbourne

Michael Conlon

CatholicServants of Jesus CommunitySeven Hills NSW

Melinda Jones

Orthodox JewHuman Rights LawyerMelbourne

Melanie & Michael Sarif

Orthodox JewsSydney

Publications

Title

Joni

Author

Joni Eareckson with Joe Musser

Publisher

S. John Bacon, Melbourne 1981

Title

All God's Children: Ministry to the Disabled

Author

Gene Newman & Joni Eareckson Tada

Publisher

Ministry Resources Library, Zondervan Publishing House 1981

Title

We Have a Story

Author

Editor: Patricia Mowbray

Publisher

Australian Catholic Bishops Conference 2006

Description

Part of the One Body in Christ, Welcoming People with Disability Kit

Title

Voices in Disability and Spirituality from the Land Down Under: Outback to Outfront

Author

Editors: Dr Christopher Newell & Rev Andy Calder

Publisher

The Haworth Press, Inc.

Title

Spirituality and Intellectual Disability: International Perspectives on the Effect of Culture and Religion on Healing Body, Mind, and Soul

Author

Editors: William C. Gaventa, Jr, MDiv & David L. Coulter, MD

Publisher

The Haworth Press, Inc.

Further Information

Jewish Care

Disability Inclusion - Multifaith

Australian Catholic Disability CouncilOne Body in Christ: Welcoming People with Disability kit